CURRENT PROJECTS
Spanglish Sh!t
Book and Lyrics by Samora La Perdida
Music by Josiah Handelman, Matthew Zwiebel, and Mobéy Lola Irizarry
Produced by En Garde Arts
The revolution will be bilingual.
Brujita, a trans Puerto Rican witch, is on trial at the Supreme Court. The charge? Conjuring a storm of reckoning to blow the White House straight off the map. Pleading innocence, Brujita’s fiery testimony becomes a journey through memory, myth, and migration—from the lush hills of Puerto Rico to the cul-de-sacs of suburban New Jersey.
As the courtroom drama unfolds, so does a deeper reckoning: with colonization, queerness, family, and the whitewashed ghosts of her past. Bold, bilingual, and fiercely funny, Spanglish Sh!t is a spellbinding new musical that collides political satire with Caribbean folklore, courtroom fantasy with deeply personal truth, and ancestral memory with radical imagination.
Samora la Perdida (she/they) is a trilingual creator and performer. She starred in the 2022 Off-Broadway productions of Soho Rep’s Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language at Signature Theatre, as well as Tina Landau’s A Transparent Musical at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023. Her TEDxTalk, “Do Latines Need to Speak Spanish? Finding Your Lost Mother Tongue,” features spoken word and music from her upcoming bilingual brujería musical: Spanglish Sh!t. Spanglish Sh!t has been developed with Berkeley Rep, NYSCA and En Garde Arts. Her queer Spanglish rap opera, pato, pato, maricón, debuted at Ars Nova ANT FEST in 2018. Its tour of tristate area public schools was documented in the BRIC TV series Going in With Brian Vines. la Perdida graduated from LaGuardia HS as a YoungArts Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and from Carnegie Mellon University with a dual degree in Drama and Global Studies.
playdate fest!
Sponsored by Downtown Brooklyn Partnership.
We’re back, Brooklyn! En Garde Arts + Downtown Brooklyn Partnership present the second annual Playdate Fest!
Abolitionist Place Park
One night only — JUNE 13th 6pm
FREE outdoor performances
Join us for an unforgettable evening of bold, socially charged music-theatre in the open air — featuring:
Lola Mobéy Irizarry + Tó Ara fusing poetry + Caribbean improvisation
Brian Quijada + Nygel D. Robinson with fire from Mexodus
Josh Fox (yes, that Oscar-nominated Josh Fox) bringing his signature punk-folk sound
And hosting the night — the one and only Baba Isreal
Playdate Fest turns Brooklyn’s newest park into a stage for joy, discovery, and radical connection. Bring a blanket, your people, and your dancing shoes
73 seconds
Conceived, written, and performed by Jared Mezzocchi
Directed by Aya Ogawa
A solo performance about the stories we inherit—and the ones we almost never hear.
In 73 Seconds, multimedia artist Jared Mezzocchi cracks open the quiet mysteries of his family’s past. What begins as a son’s attempt to better understand his mother soon spirals into a decades-spanning excavation of memory, legacy, and the fragile line between the personal and the cosmic.
Mezzocchi, celebrated for his genre-defining projection design and hailed by The New York Times as “a leader in the virtual world,” now steps into the spotlight. Using analog technology from the 1980s—overhead projectors, VHS camcorders, and tube televisions—he constructs a live documentary, blending intimate storytelling with lo-fi magic.
Directed by Obie Award-winner Aya Ogawa, 73 Seconds is an inventive, deeply felt new work that asks how we piece together the past—especially when it resists being remembered.
Developmental workshop supported by the David M. Milch Foundation at the Catskill Arts Center.